Monday, April 30, 2012

Volume mag silenced

The Corner is reporting that Volume Magazine, published by the NZ Herald's owners APBN, has been shut down. Their last issue (The Homebrew takeover issue) comes out tomorrow. The closure has been confirmed by Volume via Twitter.

Killing off a magazine that provided a lot of great unique content for the NZ Herald's website doesn't make any sense, especially after only 33 issues. There was some very talented people behind the mag, who put a huge amount of effort into making it special, and local. We need more of that, not less.

I remember going to the launch of Volume, down at Lucha Lounge in Newmarket. I ended up chatting with an APN sales rep, who told me all about how APN had researched the market and felt very positive about developing the title, that there was a niche there that was sustainable. I was a bit surprised to hear such positive sentiment coming from a corporate type, but apparently it was just a passing fad.

From The Corner: " Tomorrow’s issue of APN street press publicationVolume will be its last, with the magazine calling it quits after 33 issues.

The Drab Doo-Riffs graced the cover of the first issue back in September 2011 and subsequently we saw a whole bunch of local artists, including PNC, Lawrence Arabia, UMO, Rackets, The Checks and David Dallas, find themselves in that same position. This week that will continue with the Home Brew “takeover” issue which will see the band on the cover ahead of the release of their debut double-album this Friday.

Regardless of all that though, this is just another blow for local music journalism and we’ll be sad to see the magazine go. Rest in peace Volume, you were great."

ADDED in last Friday's NZ Herald, their media reporter John Drinnan said that the NZ Herald and its website were undergoing review by its owners APN, and they were looking at reducing the format size to a more compact one, as part of a proposed wider review of Herald titles. No mention of killing off Volume, but does report "a 7 per cent fall in all newspaper industry revenue last year and a big shift in media habits and marketing trends affecting the sector around the world."

UPDATED: John Drinnan tells me via Twitter that he wasn't in the loop on Volume's closure

ADDED Russell Brown has blogged over at Public Address about the closure, noting that the reason given was "...Volume’s failure to perform online... the nearest thing to an actual website has been Volume’s lively, well-stocked Facebook profile. When the best way into your content is a Facebook page, you’re basically failing at web publishing...

"...It appears that Sam, who is bright, creative and organised, will find work within the Herald’s growing online Entertainment division, and will take some of Volume’s regular features with him, but there seems to be something particularly inept about what has played out here. Having taken an interesting punt on a street press music mag, APN launched its new magazine without an online strategy – and then killed it because it wasn’t working online."

UPDATED: Audio - Sam Wicks talks with BFM's Charlotte Ryan about the closure...
Sam Wicks, BFM interview: " We didn't have the advertising dollars in there to keep an organisation like APN satiated... features like Talking Heads will tick over, so there's more room to build that [online]...

The execution wasn't there in terms of how we marketed this... if you found Volume content on the Herald's website there was nothing that screamed out Volume, it just looked like other stories that were in there...

"We never had an iPhone, and iPad app. We definitely had content that was used online but I think if there had genuinely been this 360 degree presentation of that content we had, it would have been a different thing, you know... the artifact aint going anywhere, it just has to be done better and smarter."

2 comments:

Simon said...

That's just awful. The MSM vacuum in this country just grew a little more.

That said, it was always a forlorn hope that a rag like the NZ Herald would run with something like Volume for any extended period

Anonymous said...

Oh, bottom-line what will you leave us this time. You're only on this earth for a short while...